You get off the subway and shuffle home among the madding crowd. It's raining still. Back at your apartment you slip off your city shoes--Church's brogues--and settle into your slippers. Another day, another dollar. Or 16 tons, whaddya get. Or something. But then your phone flashes with an e-mail from your pal David, who moved to California last year. "Come to LA," he says, "Stay for a month. IT NEVER RAINS HERE." You casually check how many vacation days you have saved up--haven't missed a day of work in over a year. What the hell! Soon a flight's booked and the mail forwarded. You need to pack--swim trunks, linen, and a straw hat, but your brogues won't do.
That empty, shoe-shaped space in your luggage is a perfect fit for a pair of SeaVees. SeaVees are a line of shoes recently resurrected but solidly grounded in an ideal of California at its arguable coolest. Rubber specialist B.F. Goodrich started making SeaVees in the 1960s, when they were also making sneaker classic P.F. Flyers. They were marketed as casual footwear for the modern man--original print ads sound like they were written by Hollywood's own Robert Evans: "Good looking? You know it." SeaVees quietly faded into obscurity in the 70s, an era that eschewed minimalism, and hibernated for the next few decades while footwear fads rose and fell.
Two sneaker industry vets, Derek Galkin and Steven Tiller, met a couple years ago and breathed some life into SeaVees. Now the line carries the original vulcanized-sole canvas sneakers as well as extrapolations on the original design, using landmarks of California culture as inspiration--surfing, modernist architecture, and livin' right. Slip them on and feel west-coast-bound, even if you still have to work tomorrow.